Title Research

In general horror film DVDs and posters have either a very structured, solid font used for their title of have a scrawled, scratched looking font. These types of fonts are often reminiscent of the films themselves, for example the badly written titles are often for films in which the main character/ villain is a child or something relating to childhood, as you can see above on the posters for 'Orphan' (2009) and 'Humpty Dumpty' (2011). In more mature psychological thriller horrors it is more common to find a fairly basic block font with only slight added effects as can be seen with 'Mirrors' (2008) in which there is only a slight edit of a letter being mirrored and in both 'The Skeleton Key' (2005) and 'The Amnityville Horror' (2005) in which the fonts have small effects added to them.

Before doing font development I had already decided I wanted the poster to be black and white, meaning I did not need to do any research into colours or spend time deciding on which colours I would like on my poster. I did however have to decide on the correct font for the poster. In the horror genre there is two distinct types of fonts used. Some films use jaunty or scratchy looking fonts to give a messy and desperate and sometimes childlike feeling which reflects what the film is about. Other films use old or traditional fonts to give a creepy, aged feel to the poster which again is reflective of the sort of story the film tells. I have decided I would use a mix between the two, having a jaunty yet structured font, as it would represent my movie better.

Using this type of font also gives a more serious look to the poster and the movie and would possibly attract a more mature audience, which would be useful due to the movie being over 18 and so attracting a younger audience would be futile. I have decided I will be using the fonts "Beatnik SF" and "Felix Titling" with possibly a more handwritten looking text for a smaller sub-title style text underneath the main title. I will try to use solid fonts for the most part on the text on the page including actor and film information.

I decided to search the website "dafont.com" for fonts under the category 'distorted' as this seemed to match the look I wanted. Under this section I found the font 'Akoom' and decided this had the correct mixture of structure and jauntiness to suit my film.